Monday, March 26, 2007
begging and pleading
Okay... So this isn't a real update. I going to use my own forum to beg and plead with all of my friends and anyone else who reads this blog to pray for me before I take my MA exam. The exam is this Thursday and um...I'm freaking out...just a little. I just made a 48 page study guide that I can go over until Thursday. Please...I know it's Lent and most of you have a lot of things to pray about, but please try to squeeze a couple of prayers in for me.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
All about the Benjamin
Okay, in the past two days I have been criticized for not only updating my blog too slowly but also for not reading other people's blogs frequently enough. Sheesh.
I have had great plans to write about my love of literary (and TV) villains. I've also wanted to post on the very real problem of spiritual manipulation. I know it doesn't look like it from my blog, but I actually like to sit and ruminate on these topics before I write about them. Which brings me to the problem. I have had very little time to sit and ruminate about anything lately. And, unlike some people, I did not just jaunt off to some snooty colleges, so I cannot just throw up a post on how those visits went.
Well, I'm not going to talk to you today about villains or spiritual manipulation. Instead, I want to speak to you today about... Benjamin Franklin. I'm required to read this man's autobiography so that I might graduate college with a master's degree. I approached it with a certain degree of hesitation because most of the other reading on my list has been slow going, and that even counts the books that are in my area. So I opened the book last night and found that this is actually a great book and a really quick read. Franklin's style is fun and engaging. His life story reads more like an adventure novel, and I'm only at the part where he's 18 years old. Not only that, but from what I can tell, this guy is a nutcase. He wanted to leave home at 17 to move from Boston to Philadelphia. He was concerned that no boat would take him to Philadelphia alone because of his age. Therefore, he hatched an ingenious plot. Franklin had one of his friends tell a ship captain that he (Franklin) had knocked up a "naughty girl" and had to leave town ASAP. The captain, being a man of the sea, knew all too well about these kinds of scrapes and offered to take him to Philadelphia straight away. There he determined to set up a printing press, and he also made friends with people stranger than fiction.
Perhaps it's because I've been reading only classical and renaissance works for the past two or three years, or perhaps it's because Ben Franklin is just one of those guys who had an amazing life, but I am really enjoying this book. Maybe next I'll read some of Lincoln's speeches or something. All this time I have pushed off reading early American Lit. until I "retire." I've always seen it as kind of beneath the stuff I'm reading now, but who knows? Maybe I can add on early American Lit as a secondary area. That is, if I ever go on to get my PhD.
I have had great plans to write about my love of literary (and TV) villains. I've also wanted to post on the very real problem of spiritual manipulation. I know it doesn't look like it from my blog, but I actually like to sit and ruminate on these topics before I write about them. Which brings me to the problem. I have had very little time to sit and ruminate about anything lately. And, unlike some people, I did not just jaunt off to some snooty colleges, so I cannot just throw up a post on how those visits went.
Well, I'm not going to talk to you today about villains or spiritual manipulation. Instead, I want to speak to you today about... Benjamin Franklin. I'm required to read this man's autobiography so that I might graduate college with a master's degree. I approached it with a certain degree of hesitation because most of the other reading on my list has been slow going, and that even counts the books that are in my area. So I opened the book last night and found that this is actually a great book and a really quick read. Franklin's style is fun and engaging. His life story reads more like an adventure novel, and I'm only at the part where he's 18 years old. Not only that, but from what I can tell, this guy is a nutcase. He wanted to leave home at 17 to move from Boston to Philadelphia. He was concerned that no boat would take him to Philadelphia alone because of his age. Therefore, he hatched an ingenious plot. Franklin had one of his friends tell a ship captain that he (Franklin) had knocked up a "naughty girl" and had to leave town ASAP. The captain, being a man of the sea, knew all too well about these kinds of scrapes and offered to take him to Philadelphia straight away. There he determined to set up a printing press, and he also made friends with people stranger than fiction.
Perhaps it's because I've been reading only classical and renaissance works for the past two or three years, or perhaps it's because Ben Franklin is just one of those guys who had an amazing life, but I am really enjoying this book. Maybe next I'll read some of Lincoln's speeches or something. All this time I have pushed off reading early American Lit. until I "retire." I've always seen it as kind of beneath the stuff I'm reading now, but who knows? Maybe I can add on early American Lit as a secondary area. That is, if I ever go on to get my PhD.
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